Supplied Photo/Maxime Vallieres

By Chris Brown

The Sun Will Rise

Quebec musician’s new work inspired by Medicine Hat and Ewart Duggan House

Oct 25, 2020 | 10:13 AM

An EP that began during an artist-in-residence stint at the Ewart Duggan House in 2019 has been released.

Quebec artist and electronic music producer Maxime Vallieres spent three weeks in Medicine Hat in the winter of 2019. The inspiration he found in the 133-year-old house became the four-song EP The Sun Will Rise.

“It’s always inspiring to be in a place that has so much history and the Ewart Duggan House has a lot of that as you know,” Vailleres said recently. “There are all these photos of the different people that lived in the house and different people from Medicine Hat and all that and it was quite a different experience to see all these faces and get inspired by their stories.”

As for the physical house itself, Vallieres says he was inspired by such things as the fireplace and air vents which he recorded into audio samples and later used to create the atmosphere of the music and the rhythm sections on the EP.

The people and community also served as inspiration for The Sun Will Rise.

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“I met so many people who were artists-in-residence at Medalta. I had some late nights with them a talked about different things and I had a chance to experience the town itself and see different places and I had a chance to experience the town with the locals as well. I think all of that really inspired the new EP.”

While out in the community something Vallieres felt brought his mind back to Quebec: A desire for change among his generation.

I remember 10, 15 years ago when I was a teenager we felt that we had a raw energy in Quebec and I felt the same way in Medicine Hat,” he said. “This sort of awakening of ‘We want change. We are the new generation.’”

Those feelings changed Vallieres and the course the EP was on.

When he arrived in Medicine Hat, Vallieres says he was starting to fall into a depression that firmly took hold in the following months. He says that was impacting the EP, for which the music and some of the lyrics were written in Medicine Hat. But when he came back to it months later he felt he needed to create something lighter, based on the desire for change he remembered feeling in Medicine Hat.

“When I met all these people there was an energy looking for things to change,” he said. “I just wanted to translate it into something positive.”

For more visit Vallieres’ website at maximevallieres.co